Evelyn Anderson, my mother, died in 1967 at the age of 53. She was a woman of tremendous ambition, courage, and accomplishment. In 1950 she entered North Dakota Agricultural College to complete a degree in home economics. Simultaneously, she was taking care of her husband and their young daughters. I was eight years old when she graduated in 1952.

From then until her premature death in 1967, she was the home service supervisor for Northern States Power Company, an electric utility, at their office in Fargo North Dakota. She was a shining role model to me my two older sisters and many other young women who saw in that repressed and unliberated time that women could forge ahead and realize their potential outside of the homemaker role. 1/7/95